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Burjor Jal Avari

﻿August 24, 1985 Knowledge in Search of Mammon Higher Education in Britain George Joseph Burjor Jal Avari IN few areas of public policy is the petty bourgeois (or poujadist) mentality of Margaret Thatcher's government so marked as in higher education. In this area too the ethos of the shopkeeper has taken over: its products are to be valued in terms of pounds and pence. At a time when higher educational institutions are still reeling from the blow that depleted their numbers and placed stringent financial constraints on their activities, they are being increasingly pressuris- ed to take their wares into the market place. A new brand of salesmen is emerging, for whom quality of scholarship and consideration of needs of students are less important than the marketability of their products and the excess capacity to be filled. The Third World is a particularly convenient hunting ground for these salesmen. Their main in terest is in attracting students in those disciplines where domestic recruitment has been curtailed by government diktat or by falling demand among those who have an eye on the shrinking job market.